The History Of Gaming
Video games are an extremely large part of pop culture and are becoming more advanced to this day.
The early days
The first game, OXO, was a digital version of the classic pen and paper game Tic Tac Toe. It was made at Cambridge University. Later, another man, William Higinbotham, made one of the first video games that widely inspired a gaming sensation.
The video game crash of 1983
In 1983, so many companies were making low quality game consoles that video games were crashing as a trend. Nintendo saved all of that with its first console, the NES, or Nintendo Entertainment System. Nintendo was founded in Japan and began by making playing card games. In 1983, they made the Famicom (Short for Family computer for Japan.) Its first console in America didn’t release until 1985 when the NES, a cartridge based game console, hit store shelves. The impact of the NES was felt immediately because of the way that Nintendo ran an extremely tight ship when it came to the games being released on their console. Unlike what console makers had been doing previously, Nintendo only allowed developers that were specifically licensed and had been given permission to develop and release games for the NES. This meant Nintendo could control what was published, so that their games would contain no violence, sexuality, politics or religion. This also meant that the games were higher quality and made more money. Plus, the official cartridges had a chip in them so only official cartridges could be used. That way, low-quality third party cartridges would not work.
Later, in 1987, Sega released the sega genesis, another game console with new characters, such as sonic the hedgehog.
3D Games
Later, in September 1995, Sony released the PS1, or Playstation 1, which introduced 3D games to the video game industry, and used discs, which were cheaper to produce and held more storage. Titles such as Twisted Metal and Ridge Racer Hit popularity. In 1996, Nintendo released the N64, which came with Super Mario 64, which was an instant hit. However, the PS1 was simpler to use, so it sold more. Also, Sega made The Sega Saturn, which had 3 graphics, but a 2d player camera. It’s like a quesadilla. It’s actually 3d, but it looks 2d. In 2001, Nintendo abandoned cartridges and started using discs, and made the gamecube have better graphics.
Game Security
The GameCube could detect pirated discs and if it detected one, it would
lock itself so that it would be useless from now on. Piracy could be found by
assigning an official serial
number to each copy of a game and if an incorrect serial number was
entered, it would lock, shown in the image below. Other ways were to have something like a physical cipher wheel to use in the game, but these were inefficient as if the physical thing
was lost, the entire game was useless. One of the most strategic ways was in a game called Game Dev Tycoon, where the developer made a version for pirates and released it on popular piracy websites. In this version, the player’s in-game games were pirated, and the player eventually went bankrupt. People with pirated copies would comment on the official Steam page saying things like, “I would be easily making money right now, but people keep pirating my games and I go bankrupt! It’s so unfair! I work really hard to make these games and they get pirated! Please fix this issue!” (Hypocrites.)
Gaming now
Nowadays, gaming has a huge influence on the world, with games such as the Legend of Zelda series gaining in popularity, and with 15% of content on YouTube being gaming. One of my personal favorite games is Pizza Tower, which was only released in january. Gaming has gone from Tic-Tac-Toe to huge, multiplayer 3d games and the extremely popular game Minecraft. VR is also popular as it supplies a 3D 360° view of things. Once the iPhone 1 was created, mobile games also took a hit such as Angry Birds and Subway surfers.
